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Further, they must explain in what sense they hold that
Matter tends to slip away from its form [the Idea]. Can we
conceive it stealing out from stones and rocks or whatever else
envelops it?
And of course they cannot pretend that Matter in some cases
rebels and sometimes not. For if once it makes away of its own
will, why should it not always escape? If it is fixed despite
itself, it must be enveloped by some Ideal-Form for good and all.
This, however, leaves still the question why a given portion of
Matter does not remain constant to any one given form: the reason
lies mainly in the fact that the Ideas are constantly passing
into it.
In what sense, then, is it said to elude form?
By very nature and for ever?
But does not this precisely mean that it never ceases to be
itself, in other words that its one form is an invincible
formlessness? In no other sense has Plato's dictum any value to
those that invoke it.
Matter [we read] is "the receptacle and nurse of all generation."
Now if Matter is such a receptacle and nurse, all generation is
distinct from it; and since all the changeable lies in the realm
of generation, Matter, existing before all generation, must exist
before all change.
"Receptacle" and "nurse"; then it "retains its identity; it is
not subject to modification. Similarly if it is" [as again we
read] "the ground on which individual things appear and
disappear," and so, too, if it is a "place, a base." Where Plato
describes and identifies it as "a ground to the ideas" he is not
attributing any state to it; he is probing after its distinctive
manner of being.
And what is that?
This which we think of as a Nature-Kind cannot be included among
Existents but must utterly rebel from the Essence of Real Beings
and be therefore wholly something other than they- for they are
Reason-Principles and possess Authentic Existence- it must
inevitably, by virtue of that difference, retain its integrity to
the point of being permanently closed against them and, more, of
rejecting close participation in any image of them.
Only on these terms can it be completely different: once it took
any Idea to hearth and home, it would become a new thing, for it
would cease to be the thing apart, the ground of all else, the
receptacle of absolutely any and every form. If there is to be a
ceaseless coming into it and going out from it, itself must be
unmoved and immune in all the come and go. The entrant Idea will
enter as an image, the untrue entering the untruth.
But, at least, in a true entry?
No: How could there be a true entry into that which, by being
falsity, is banned from ever touching truth?
Is this then a pseudo-entry into a pseudo-entity- something
merely brought near, as faces enter the mirror, there to remain
just as long as the people look into it?
Yes: if we eliminated the Authentic Existents from this Sphere
nothing of all now seen in sense would appear one moment longer.
Here the mirror itself is seen, for it is itself an Ideal-Form of
a Kind [has some degree of Real Being]; but bare Matter, which is
no Idea, is not a visible thing; if it were, it would have been
visible in its own character before anything else appeared upon
it. The condition of Matter may be illustrated by that of air
penetrated by light and remaining, even so, unseen because it is
invisible whatever happens.
The reflections in the mirror are not taken to be real, all the
less since the appliance on which they appear is seen and remains
while the images disappear, but Matter is not seen either with
the images or without them. But suppose the reflections on the
mirror remaining and the mirror itself not seen, we would never
doubt the solid reality of all that appears.
If, then, there is, really, something in a mirror, we may suppose
objects of sense to be in Matter in precisely that way: if in the
mirror there is nothing, if there is only a seeming of something,
then we may judge that in Matter there is the same delusion and
that the seeming is to be traced to the Substantial-Existence of
the Real-Beings, that Substantial-Existence in which the
Authentic has the real participation while only an unreal
participation can belong to the unauthentic since their condition
must differ from that which they would know if the parts were
reversed, if the Authentic Existents were not and they were.
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